Tag Archives: American Journal of Sociology

Dana Rudoph at Keen News Service looks at the findings from a Harvard researcher’s recent study on anti-LGBT job discrimination.

Rudolph reports that the researcher sent 1,769 pairs of fictitious resumes to private employers in seven states, including, you guessed it, Texas. Each pair of resumes consisted of one from an obviously gay man and one from an apparently straight one.

Overall, the study found that the straight applicants were 1.5 times more likely to receive callbacks on their resumes than the gay applicants. The straight applicants had to apply for fewer than nine jobs before getting an interview, whereas the gay ones had to apply for almost 14. But the results varied widely across the seven states:

In New York, Pennsylvania, and California, the gap between callbacks for gay and heterosexual “applicants” was insignificant.

But in Texas, résumés of heterosexual men received more than three times as many callbacks as those of gay men. Heterosexual men would need to apply for only eight jobs to get an interview, versus 27 for gay men.

In Ohio, résumés of heterosexual men received over two-and-a-half times as many callbacks, and in Florida, almost twice as many.